The Blood Road by Stuart MacBride

Author:Stuart MacBride
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780008208233
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

28

Steel puckered her lips, whistling something cheery as she drove them away from Ellie Morton’s house.

Sitting in the passenger seat, Logan stared at her. Doing his best. Really, really doing his best to stay calm. ‘What the goat-shagging hell was that supposed to be?’

She stopped whistling and turned onto the main road. ‘That song off Timmy and the Timeonauts. The one about the stinky dinosaur who—’

‘Not the bloody whistling: goading Russell Morton!’ OK: now he wasn’t doing quite so well at the staying-calm thing. Starting to get a bit shouty, to be honest. Which was perfectly justifiable in the circumstances.

‘He’s a scroungy—’

‘His step-daughter’s missing!’

A shrug. ‘Yeah, but he’s the one probably—’

‘And you did it in front of a journalist!’ Getting even louder. ‘Because God forbid you go to all that trouble acting like an arsehole without an actual audience!’

She took one hand off the steering wheel and gave him the same Vs she’d given Angela Parks. Long and slow. ‘For your information, sunshine, Russell Morton is an abusive, sexist, misogynistic wankspasm.’

‘I don’t care if he’s Jack the Ripper – you want to rattle him to see what falls out? That’s fine. But you don’t do it in front of a reporter!’

‘Aye, well, doesn’t matter, does it?’ Steel took them out onto Tillydrone Avenue again. ‘You heard him: if she prints a word of it, he’ll “have her”. And where does that lanky strip of puke get off calling her a “skinny munter cow”? He looks like the bastard lovechild of Frankenstein’s monster and a bicycle-seat sniffing smackhead.’

Unbelievable.

‘You think that makes it OK?’

‘Course it does.’

The woman was completely unbelievable.

‘What would’ve happened if I’d done something that stupid when I was working for you? You’d have blown your rag.’

‘Blah, blah, blah.’

Why did he bother? Why? What was the point?

He thumped back in his seat. ‘I should’ve stuck with Rennie. You’re a crap sidekick.’

‘Oh aye. And if you ever shout at me like that again I’m going to rip your nadgers off and feed them to your cat.’

North Anderson Drive slid by, taking its tower blocks, roundabouts, and soggy housing estates with it.

Steel overtook a rusty Land Rover with a yellow ‘BEARDED SEXGOD ON BOARD’ sign stuck to the rear window. ‘See, if you ask me—’

‘Which I didn’t.’ Logan poked at his phone again. No new text messages.

‘We’re wasting our time searching for Ellie Morton.’

‘She’s a little girl!’

‘She’s a dead little girl.’ A right at the roundabout, onto King’s Gate – with its squat granite bungalows and cycle lanes. ‘Russell Morton comes home drunk and stoned, tries it on with her – cos he’s that sort of guy, you can tell just by looking at him – she screams, he kills her.’

‘And where’s Ellie’s mum when all this is happening?’

‘Probably passed out on the couch, surrounded by empty lager cans and copies of Dysfunctional Family Monthly.’

Trees lined the road, opening up into parkland, the grass so waterlogged after the last few days it had grown its own lochan.

‘He was with his mates, remember?’ That was the trouble with Steel – never paid any attention to anything.

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